Cutting Diamonds for learning ?

[Naboo]

Hi all

Been a long road getting my heads and machine to a stage it's ready to test...
and am (like I imagine most people are) terrified of destroying good/expensive cutting diamonds

Has anyone come up with a good alternative to use while doing initial tests to avoid expensive mistakes ?
or is it best to go straight for a synthetic diamond over the standard.. presuming they're stronger and less likely to be badly damaged ?

Looking to start cutting with diamonds on PETG

Cheers
B

[markrob]

Hi,

There are a few things you can do:

1. Cut lacquers using a sapphire styli. Lower in cost and very close to what you will get with a diamond. Its getting hard to find lacquers for this purpose at a reasonable cost these days. You can sometimes find old stock on Ebay that a pro would never use, but will work for your purposes. Make your test cuts as short as possible to get many tests on a side.

2. Emboss using Polycarbonate or PETG. Very low cost. Stereo will be lacking, but you will be able to get a good idea on the head performance.

3. Build a test stand. Design and build a fixture to couple the head to a low cost magnetic or ceramic pickup. Use a drill blank stub to stand in for the cutting stylus and mechanically couple the pickup stylus. This will let you simulate the cutting operation without using any media. It will typically give you good data up to about 5Khz or so depending on the setup. The biggest issues are the feed through of the drive coil field to the low level pickup at higher frequencies that will swamp out the actual mechanical movement of the stylus. Depending on the head construction, it does not take into account the the physical loading of the head due to the cutting media. Still, it saves a lot of wasted material and is not so hard to build.

Hope you find this helpful.

Mark

[Naboo]

Hi Mark
Thanks for those suggestions

I've fortunately been able to already test the heads on a local VR, so I know they perform very well
now I'm up to the stage of testing my whole machine and wanting to know if the head lever and counterweight systems work right, if there's any motor noise transmitted etc etc

I luckily have some polycarb plates so will try source an embossing shank.. could be good for testing for surface/motor noise

Cheers